Hole, 'Pacific Coast Highway' (Sessions)

It's the week of the 16th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death and Courtney Love, joined by guitarist Micko Larkin, is in the throes of promotion in New York City for Hole's new album, 'Nobody's Daughter' -- the band's first since 1998's 'Celebrity Skin.' The anniversary is a detail to be noted but not be mentioned.

"Courtney Love is actually on a sabbatical," Love announces at Hole's acoustic Sessions taping, the band's first-ever online performance. "We have sent her upstate."

Love is only half-kidding and referring, of course, to her much-vilified public persona, whose online diatribes are rivaled only by her dizzying conversational detours. It's that Courtney Love -- the one Rolling Stone dubbed the "Most Controversial Woman in the History of Rock" -- to whom the rocker has bid farewell. Well, for now. "I don't have to have my crazy on anymore," she says. "But I'll always be slightly neurotic."

Love and Larkin are playfully and determinedly running through a series of songs, including a new, never-before-recorded Hole tune 'Pretty Your Whole Life' and a cover of Big Star's 'Thirteen' in remembrance of the late Alex Chilton. "I love this song," Love says of the latter before the first and only take. "It's about prepubescent love ... before the pubic hairs come. Alright, let's go."

It's typical verbal fodder from Love, who, through the profanity-laced raspy retorts, weaves in humor and heady vocabulary in spades. And so it begins.